Outcry over Trump's cuts to Medicare hospital payments

Once in the White House, Trump reneged on his Medicaid promise, and now he's being criticized for proposing steep Medicare payment cuts in his new budget.

"The president doesn't believe he is breaking his commitments to the American people at all", Vought replied, saying the budget proposed not cuts, but reforms that would help lower drug prices, leading to Medicare savings. The cost-saving covers some of the mandatory programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and programs on federal health care.

Trump's 2020 budget, however, reduces Medicare spending by $845 billion over 10 years compared to current law.

In 2017, when Republicans still controlled both chambers of Congress, as well as the White House, they pushed through deep tax cuts, mainly for businesses, that were projected to add $1.5 trillion to the $20 trillion national debt over 10 years.

As a candidate early in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump held himself out as a different kind of Republican. "And it's not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to. cut".

A senior Senate Republican gave a lukewarm welcome to U.S. President Donald Trump's 2020 budget plan, complaining on Wednesday that growing debt was taking the country in "an ominous direction".

The proposed Medicare cuts are another issue.

"If we can reduce the regulatory state and get health care costs down, we can get the economic engine going, and then restrain spending". Because the program is so big, even a single-digit reduction in percent terms can add up to hundreds of billions of dollars over time.

President Trump's 2020 budget request of an extra $291 million to fight the spread of H.I.V., experts said on Tuesday, will not be remotely sufficient to meet the goal he announced in his State of the Union address: to almost eliminate the AIDS epidemic in the United States within 10 years. That includes shifting roughly $269 billion in funding for training medical residents and payments to hospitals for caring for the uninsured to the Department of Health and Human Services' budget. It also wants to slow the growth of payments for skilled nursing, inpatient rehab facilities and home health services, said Tricia Neuman, director, Program on Medicare Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Democrats also denounced Trump's proposed cutbacks in education, community development, student loans and free school meals for low-income students.

At the moment the budget will be debated - probably in mid-October - presidential campaigns will be intensifying and Trump's interests may be closer to the primaries than to actually getting something out of Congress.

The Medicare Rights Center said "it is hard to envision a situation where these changes do not profoundly impact the lives of people who depend on the program".

The group also said it's concerned about that some of Trump's Medicare drug proposals could create winners and losers among beneficiaries.